- May 16, 2008
- 11,418
- 2,336
- Home Country
-
Germany
Here is my user report and setup description of the Justop G-PC Quad Core Windows 8.1 Mini PC, which I bought from Amazon UK for 90 GBP (ca. 125 EUR):

The PC comes in a small carton, together with the PSU and a 1m long HMDI cable.
A few things should be considered when installing in a non-UK environment:

The PC comes in a small carton, together with the PSU and a 1m long HMDI cable.
A few things should be considered when installing in a non-UK environment:
- Power Supply
- First surprise: the PSU is a 12V/2.5 A unit that comes with fixed electric UK connector
- International users will either have to use a UK->EU adapter (ca. 2.50 EUR on Ebay) or buy a new supply at additional cost
- Power consumption
- 0.3W when completely off
- 4.5W Windows desktop, inactive
- 8.0W TITANIUS home menu screen
- 7.1W MePo fullscreen TV 720p source
- 9.0W MePo fullscreen TV 1080i source
- 2.2W standby with "modified" energy options (see discussion about USB)
- BIOS
- Pressing DEL during startup gets you into a pretty complex BIOS
- Initial settings are quite good and very little further tweaking is required
- Power management
- I activated the only disabled function (use all C-states)
- There is no visible option for WOL (see discussion about LAN chip)
- There are two choices for action after power failure: resume (S0 state) or stay off (S5 state). Because of missing WOL I choose the first option.
- All other options were left unchanged.
- Installation
- 1. At the first launch the PC is booting into an En-US Windows 8.1
- There is one user account "Mini" (Administrator) without a password set
- Unless you want to have "Mini" as your name showing in network environment, etc. you should now create a new user account for your MediaPortal activities with the desired name. If you set this up as administrator you can delete the old user account Mini or keep it as the admin account.
- 2. Net 3.5
- As you know .NET 3.5 is required by the MePo installer to run (not by the MePo software itself).
- Activate .Net 3.5 in the Windows features before changing Region and Language information and connecting the PC to a WSUS update system, that you might have running
- The Windows system is an English-US one and some system data and messages will always be in English, even after having applied a language package.
- When activating .Net 3.5 the Windows Update is searching for drivers in the original Windows language (English), which it is not finding on a localized system. It then tries to contact the Microsoft update servers. With WSUS in place chances are big that the installation will fail.
- After this initial step download from Microsoft, further .Net 3.5 security updates will install without issues from the localized WSUS
- 3. Set up your localization under Region and Language per your requirements
- 4. Windows updates
- Run Windows update until all important updates are installed. Be patient - especially KB 2919355 takes more than an hour. As there is no HD indicator, you could get the impression that the update process got stuck.
- Updates for the in-built Bluetooth adapter and the Realtek WLAN chip are available. These are quite new (2015), hence you may want to install them.
- 1. At the first launch the PC is booting into an En-US Windows 8.1
- System setup
- Windows
- Deactivate lock screen to allow immediate boot into the desktop
- Create a new registry key Personalization in HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/Windows
- Create a DWORD entry NoLockScreen and set its value to 1
- Automatic logon
- Press Win-R and enter netplwiz
- Deactivate "User must enter a password"
- Click "Apply", select the account that you want to use, enter the password (twice) and close with OK
- Reboot to test if Windows is now booting into the desktop
- Clean up already installed software and delete the pre-installed Microsoft Office
- Deactivate lock screen to allow immediate boot into the desktop
- Windows
- Standby and Wake-up
- The system will correctly enter S3 according to the Windows energy profile that you have defined
- Unfortunately all attempts to wake the system up with mouse, keyboard or remote fail. You have to press the button on the PC
- Reason: the original settings shut off all USB hubs when in standby. The LAN adapter is a "DM9621A USB To FastEthernet Adapter", no surprise that no WOL is possible.
- Solution: open the device manager and search for the Generic USB Hub entry. Open its properties and deselect the energy option "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".
- This way the connected USB devices remain on.
- The PC can now be resumed from sleep with the MCE remote
- This comes at the price of increased power consumption of 2.2W in S3.
- Note that WOL from S5 will never be possible
- WOL
- Magic packets will not wake up the PC!
- I tried all different possibilities, i.e. keeping all USB controllers active, yet without success